The Panda That Won Andre Agassi His Freedom
When Mike Agassi saw the segment on 60 Minutes, he knew his son Andre was going to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, despite the fact he couldn’t afford its $12,000 tuition.
Given his difficult relationship with his father, you’d think Andre would’ve been relieved when he heard his fate. Instead, he was heartbroken. Even though Mike Agassi was insanely violent and abusive, he’d always supported Andre when it came to tennis.
When Andre was seven, his father had him hitting 2,500 balls a day, which meant he’d hit 17,500 balls a week, and almost a million by the end of the year.
Mike Agassi was a former Olympic boxer from Iran. He’d box in his sleep, sometimes punching Andre’s mother in bed. He was the kind of guy who always kept an ax handle in his car. And he always left the house with a handful of salt and pepper in each pocket in case he got into a fight and needed to blind someone.
He suffered from a chronically stiff neck, which sometimes led him to stand on a chair, put his neck in a harness, and kick the chair out from underneath himself to get relief. The first time Andre saw this he was sure his dad had killed himself.
Andre’s instincts would soon prove correct — the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy was worse than anything he experienced growing up under Mike Agassi’s roof. It turns out the 60 Minutes segment was actually an exposé on what Agassi would later call a “glorified prison camp.”
Andre was only supposed to be at the academy for three months — it was all Mike could afford. But that was before Nick Bollettieri saw the new kid hit. Within minutes, Nick was on the phone with Mike Agassi offering to let Andre stay at the academy free of charge. Andre was the best player he’d ever seen come through the academy.
With his sentence extended indefinitely, Andre began to rebel the way only angry adolescents can: drugs, booze, piercings, mohawks, and vandalism. When Nick finally had enough, he humiliated Andre in front of his classmates, telling him he should leave if he wanted to keep his act up. That night, Andre ran away.
He was quickly picked up by an academy staff member and was soon on the phone with Mike. After telling him the misery he experienced at the academy, Andre told Mike he wanted to come home.
Andre’s father replied, “You dress like a fag. Sounds like you deserved it.”
After the call, Nick told Andre his father asked him to take away his credit card. Andre refused. It was his only way of potentially escaping from the academy. Then, for the first time, the tyrannical Bollettieri began to negotiate with Andre.
Seeing this bit of weakness in Nick, Andre began putting the events of the night together. Nick told him to leave and then tracked him down after he left. Now he was trying to take away his only source of money. Nick needed him — Andre was his meal ticket.
In the weeks after his runaway attempt, Andre took a vow of silence, refusing to speak to Nick. This vow would only end because of a stuffed panda. In fact, the panda wound up being the key to Andre’s freedom.
At a field trip to Busch Gardens after a tennis tournament, Andre had won a huge stuffed panda at a carnival game and planned to send it to the girl he had a crush on back home.
Days later Andre was called to Nick’s office. Nick’s daughter had seen the panda and was begging her dad for it. He offered to buy the panda from Andre, but Andre left Nick’s office never speaking a word.
When Andre’s friend heard of Nick’s offer, he told Andre he was playing it all wrong. Andre finally had some leverage on Nick. He could use the Panda as a chit to trade for his freedom: bids to tournaments, better food, no more school.
The next morning Nick found the panda in his office, ass up in his chair — Andre had broken in and placed it in that position the night before.
Called back to the principal’s office, Nick gave Andre a rundown of his infractions: the silence, wearing makeup, jeans in a tournament, the mohawk, breaking into his office. He wanted to know what Andre’s problem was.
Andre finally lost it, going on a rant that ended with, “This place is hell, and I want to burn it down.”
He had finally stood up to his master and called his bluff. All that was left was to negotiate the terms of surrender: No more school, spots in wildcard matches, and bids to tournaments.
Within hours Nick agreed to Andre’s terms. He was 14-years-old and would never have to go to school again.
Andre would turn pro on his 16th birthday, cashing his first tourney check for $1,100. The next day, Nike called to offer him an endorsement deal that paid him $20,000 per year. He became the fastest pro to win $1 million in career prize money after just 43 professional tournaments.
Agassi would go on to win eight Grand Slams and a gold medal at the 1996 Olympics. He became one of the biggest stars in the sport’s history. Upon retirement, Agassi, the eighth-grade dropout, would open the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas for at-risk children.
For his entire life, leading up to that fateful confrontation about the stuffed panda, Andre Agassi served two unrelenting masters: his father and Nick Bollettieri. Acting out at the academy was Andre’s way of asserting some agency in his own life.
Bollettieri was oblivious to the fact that Andre was on what Robert Greene, the author of the 33 Strategies of War, calls the “death ground.” The death ground strategy is more of a warning, that when your enemy is out of options and backed into a corner, they will fight with almost superhuman strength because they are facing certain death.
Andre was a desperate, miserable 14-year-old, yet he had the awareness to recognize the leverage he had over Nick, and the courage to act on it when the opportunity came. Only then did he win his freedom.
It can often feel like we’re powerless in the face of larger forces in our lives. We’re cursed with the knowledge of our worst qualities, so we tend to focus on our weaknesses rather than the areas we are powerful or have the advantage.
In our jobs, relationships, and even daily routines, we’d do much better to look for leverage points and take action to capitalize on them. Even small shifts can have cascading effects on our lives. By making it a practice to look for leverage points and acting on them, we can avoid being backed into the “death ground,” forced to act out of desperation. Instead, we can be proactive, always looking for chances to leverage our strengths and retain our sense of agency.
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